These poems from 1992 are the earliest examples of my writing that I still have. I was 17 years old, and looking back at them now feels rather different from looking at the writing that came afterwards.
There is something quite makeshift about this collection. These weren’t all written in the same kind of notebook or carefully kept writing pad. They were written in college pads, ordinary writing pads I happened to have lying around, and on scraps of paper. I hadn’t yet settled into the habit that would become such a familiar part of my writing life: using W.H. Smith writing pads.
Those pads would eventually become my thing. They provided a sort of continuity, a familiar place to put my thoughts, poems and ideas. But in 1992, there was no system, no particular method and no real sense that I was beginning an archive. I was simply writing things down.
Even these poems aren’t necessarily the beginning. I have memories of writing things before 1992, and I can only presume that somewhere there may be other scraps of paper or old pads that have been lost over the years. It is quite possible that there are things I wrote before these that I will never see again. So this is the earliest writing I have managed to preserve, rather than necessarily the first writing I ever did.
And perhaps that makes this collection all the more interesting to me.
Reading these poems, I can see the naivety quite clearly. There are clichés, familiar expressions, obvious rhymes and moments when the writing is trying a little too hard to say something profound. Some of the imagery is rather unlikely, and the poems are hardly examples of literary genius. I don’t want to pretend otherwise.
But I also don’t want to dismiss them.
There is an innocence here that I find quite touching. The writing feels relatively uncorrupted. I don’t mean that it is untouched by the world, or that it is particularly sophisticated. Quite the opposite. It feels as though I was writing without much awareness of what poetry was supposed to be, what a poem should look like, or how I might be judged for writing one.
I was just having a go.
There is a certain openness in that. Ideas arrive, sometimes in the most unexpected combinations. The sun and the moon, stars and aliens, journeys through the universe, strange characters, imaginary places and thoughts about love and loneliness all find their way onto the page. There is a youthful willingness to follow an idea wherever it might lead, even if the result doesn’t always quite work.
A number of the poems are concerned with girls, affection, longing and the difficulty of making sense of relationships. Looking back, I can see how much importance I gave to these feelings. There is a sense of someone trying to understand himself through the way he feels about other people. At times, that comes across as rather sentimental, but there is an honesty in it too.
There are also darker moments. Loneliness, insecurity, confusion, fear and a sense of not quite fitting into the world appear throughout the writing. Poems such as All Alone Again, Worded Friend, The Dance of the Sun and the Moon and Here I Sit and Write give glimpses of a young person trying to make sense of his thoughts. Elsewhere, the imagination takes over and the writing becomes almost surreal.
What strikes me is that these things sit alongside one another without much concern for consistency. One moment I might be writing about love, the next about the universe, madness, society or some strange character who has appeared in my imagination. I wasn’t trying to establish a style or create a body of work with a particular direction. I was simply exploring whatever happened to enter my head.
I wonder whether that is one of the things we gradually lose as we get older.
At 17, perhaps I hadn’t yet developed the self-consciousness that comes with experience. I wasn’t looking back at earlier work and comparing myself with it. I wasn’t thinking about literary influences, reputation, quality or whether something was good enough to keep. There is a directness to some of these poems that I don’t think can easily be recreated later.
Of course, growing older brings other things. You gain experience, a wider understanding of people, a greater vocabulary and, hopefully, a better sense of how to express what you want to say. Your writing can become more controlled and more considered. You learn what works and what doesn’t. You become more capable.
But perhaps something gets lost along the way as well. Maybe you become more guarded. Maybe you start questioning an idea before you have allowed it to develop. Perhaps the freedom to write something completely daft, sincere or wildly imaginative becomes harder to find because you know too much.
I don’t necessarily think that is a bad thing. Growing and developing as a writer is important. But looking at these early poems makes me wonder whether the innocence of the beginning is something worth holding on to.
These are not polished poems. They are uneven, sometimes awkward, sometimes clichéd, and occasionally rather strange. But they belong to a moment in my life that I can never return to. They capture something of being 17, before I had developed the habits and routines that would later become part of my writing identity.
Perhaps that is their greatest value.
I can see the beginnings of recurring interests and preoccupations, but I can also see a young person who hadn’t yet put boundaries around his imagination. There is no carefully constructed writer’s identity here. There are just words on whatever paper was available, written because, for whatever reason, I wanted to write them.
I am glad I kept them.
And I am rather glad that they are not perfect. If they were more polished, perhaps they wouldn’t give me quite the same glimpse of who I was at the time.
These are my earliest surviving words. There may have been others before them, now lost somewhere in the past. But these are the ones that made it through.
And, in their own small way, they are where this archive begins.
Read the 1992 poems and writing collection.
Isn’t This Fun? 1992 Poetry and Writing
